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Forward contracts - Fix your exchange rate in advance

Exchange rates can fluctuate dramatically so it can be risky to leave yourself open to market movements when converting money from one currency to another. Of course the rate could move in your favour, however, it could also move enough against you to completely ruin your budget and your plans.

A Forward contract with FC Exchange means you can fix your exchange rate for up to two years in advance, so you’ll know exactly how much you’ll get when you make your international money transfer. This makes budgeting a great deal easier and a lot of stress is removed.

Call us to discuss things like the amount of money you are looking to exchange and the time frames you have to work within. We can look into rates for you which can be used to calculate the exact sums of both currencies involved – you’ll know exactly what you’re getting.

If you want to go ahead, we will agree the exchange rate at which your money will be transferred in the future. You will send us a deposit (this is not an extra cost; it’s deducted from the balance you pay in the future). Then, when the transaction reaches the ‘settlement date’, you pay us the balance at the pre-agreed rate. All you need to do then is tell us where to send your money.

Forward contracts can be ideal if you don’t need to make a payment immediately but you can’t afford for the exchange rate to be moving wildly. If, for example, you’ve agreed to buy or sell a house overseas, but the completion date is a few weeks or months away, a Forward contract lets you guarantee the exchange rate, so you know exactly what the house will cost on completion day.

Paying a deposit

When we book a Forward contract for you we’ll ask you for a deposit (which is industry-standard). The deposit just covers the risk we take in agreeing to buy all of your currency in advance with our counterparties.

We’ll ask you for somewhere between 5% and 10% of the value of the currency you are selling. This is a guide to the deposit you may need and the exact amount depends on things like the currencies involved and how far into the future you would like to fix a rate. You can call us and we’ll talk through your particular circumstances.

Depending on currency fluctuations, we might need to increase your deposit over the time period of your contract in order to maintain the agreed deposit level. This is called a ‘margin call’. We can always return any extra to you if rates change back. Either way any extra deposit isn’t an extra cost, it just means you pay less on the completing payment.

Flexible settlement dates

You can ask us to book a ‘window period’ for you with the Forward Contract settlement date. This means you can settle in between two pre-determined dates that you tell us at the outset. This can be a really useful way to cover off foreign exchange risk if you don’t know the exact date when you’ll need to pay, but you still want to fix the rate. Again, this is really handy for property completions, because although you may have a firm completion date, funds can still take a few days to be released by a solicitor or notary.